My thoughts on the demo:
Really liked that naughty dog chose to show a core moment to moment gameplay instead of a setpiece, firstly because the uncharted series setpieces were spoiled way too before the game released and i can't control myself to watch these pre-release videos. I hope that they take a the last of us approach in terms of what they reveal before the release of the game.
The gameplay of tlou was great because of how replayable it made the game to me, the game already has a really nice pacing, and i love exploring the game mechanics and the different approachs that i can make. not only that but also the fact that different conversations happen very often or if they are repeated, they are quick and well made enough for me to enjoy it again. Sometimes in uc 2 and 3, when i tried to go stealth, i sometimes encountered an impossible obstacle that i had to tackle the situation in an offensive manner. In uc3, if you take down every single enemy in the session before you enter the airplane, when you need to climb up to the roof, there will be two guards next to each other, if i take one down, the other is alerted. The problem is, if you alert the guy, the game spawns other enemies even if you killed everyone else. because of this, some parts of the combat in the uncharted series were a little restrictive.
so when they showed the new combat in this demo, i was wowed, they introduced new items in this demo (i don't know if they will introduce other ways to traverse the land, i hope so, it would be very cool!), and the stealth had a much bigger emphasis in it, you now can even break line of sight, run away without killing everyone, sneak up and stealthly kill them. a lot of options! the level was also huge, much bigger than even ship graveyard. and now with the stealth refined, you won't have some of the problems you had when playing those sections. this will make the game VERY replayable, and it will expand the gameplay a looooot! seriously impressed by it. maybe i played too much uncharted and the last of us, but i think these refinements will make the game much more enjoyable to a lot of people, even if they don't notice it right now. the hook and dagger are cool additions too, making the verticality and flexibility of the gameplay even bigger, props to the guys and girls at nd responsible for this.
another thing that i noticed was that they implemented these "narrative" scenes like in tlou where you can go to a point of interest, press triangle, and nathan will comment on it. it will make exploring the game much more fun than looking for the relics too (specially because those were generally too out of the common path).
nathan also took a note from that dead guy and put it on his note, what would that be? hints to a side treasure? or would it be like the notes from tlou (where some of them had codes and hints for vaults and items if you explored the houses and places of the game). would be very cool for the collectables to be these notes. I think that the map behind the note is just cosmetic, do you think that it can lead to a side treasure like i said before? the demo tried to compress the moment to moment gameplay, so if they included that, it can have some kind of importance to the game.
Oh and nathan has a brother? WHAT? i will be very cool to see them banter, specially that it's troy baker (would be cool to see james mccaffrey as his older brother, making monologues just like his little brother haha, but i love troy so it's not a problem).
anyway, loved the enhancements to the uncharted formula, and they brought the best parts of the tlou gameplay to uc without uc losing its owns characteristics.
i wonder what changed from amy stepping down to neil/bruce taking the helm. they didn't scrap everything altogether, but the game seems very far along since they took the helm, officially at least, in march.
